Unlike the excellent example of wood carving posted by Miketoon, my winter projects was something more mundane. Typical of engineers it had to be something with a technical content while at the same time the end result must serve no purpose whatsoever. After much deliberation the final choice was a wooden soccer ball. Not just a large lump of wood turned in a lathe but a modern hollow Buckyball. Or to give it its proper name a truncated icosahedron.. Now there’s a word you can impress your pals down the pub with. Basically it comprises of twenty hexagons and twelve pentagons. The basic shapes are well known but unfortunately, with the faces having thickness the interface angles required a bit of basic trigonometry. A task I could have avoided if I’d done a proper Google search.
Accuracy is paramount, but not having access to a computer driven multi-axis milling machine I opted for the next best thing, a hacksaw and sandpaper. I must admit making this quantity of identical parts was a bit of a bore. Then came the difficult bit. Gluing them together. With higher management always too busy to bother with such trivialities and me being born with a genetic fault that gave me only one pair of hands; this operation proved to be a major stumbling block. Finally after much deliberation and a rare surge of activity and with one mighty bound our hero was free or in this case stuck together
The end result was exactly what I wanted a good talking point but utterly useless. .

For anyone who is really interested in wood carving I would suggest Google “You Tube” Grinling Gibbons.. Fantastic Stuff!

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Well, I would like to say I am well impressed with the outcome and can imagine those 3D type angles being a real pain so well done indeed, shapes like this show up any faults too as everything is repeated so a big challenge to keep things looking even. The Romans had a similar thing called dodecahedrons but each side had a hole in it , so it was hollow lattice sort of effect with small balls on the corners as in this link http://www.archeolog-home.com/pages/con ... rever.html By the sounds of it no one knows what they were for or why they had them.